After Lebanon
by Denver C
Summary: John wakes after the "dream" One Shot


John ended the call and leaned back in the Imapla's seat, rubbing a hand over his face. He dreamed of Mary regualrly - had ever since Yellow Eyes took her away from him - but this dream was different. Usually, his subconsious took him down a road where she has never died. Where he had never become a hunter. Where his boys had been able to have "normal" childhoods, whatever that really meant, and the only "monsters" were the typical night terrors of a young child's imagination. Where demon was just a word you occasionally heard in church. A world he had realized long ago had never really existed.

He had told Dean that it had been a good dream, and he meant it. He had gotten to see his boys back together and fighting on the same side again. He had managed to have a long overdue talk with Sammy. He really wished that part, at least, had been real.

One of John's greatest regrets in life was the wedge between himself and his baby boy. Of course, if Sam wasn't so stubborn, so determined to have a "normal life..." If Sam wasn't so much like his mother...

John's heart squeezed again at that thought, just as it always did. He may have only spent six months of his life with her, but Sammy was very much Mary's boy. They had the same hard set to their jaw when they felt someone wasn't listening to them, They had the same need to talk everything to death in order to "reach an understanding." Sometimes he wondered just how much of his wife's personality had been hardwired into that boy.

The only thing Sam seemed to have gotten from his father was a tendency to run. Dad and Dean aren't listening to you? Run and hide out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. (Alright, so it had been the middle of Falgstaff, Arizona. Same thing.) Don't feel Dad's taking your dreams seriously? Run and hide out at Stanford. (Pre-law. Damn, his grandfather would be proud.)

Demon pins the love of your life to the ceiling and sets her ablaze, along with your home and the life you've created together? Throw your kids in the car and run cross country looking for revenge. (Seemed like a reasonable response...)

John shook his head with a slightly bitter laugh. He would've loved to give Sam and Dean the life they deserved, but that just hadn't been in the cards. For that matter, he would love to give them the life they'd had in his dream - before his arival changed everything - even if he wasn't a part of it. As he had told them, the choice between himself and their mother was no choice. He would pick Mary's life over his every time, even if it led to him being trapped in Hell for a time.

He stared at his left hand for a long moment. He could still feel the phantom pressure of her hand gripping his. Closing his eyes, he tightened his fingers into a loose fist, imagining that he was squeezing her hand once again. It may be foolish. It may lead nowhere (after all, it was just a dream, right?) but he had made his decision. He was going to give his sons whatever miniscule chance that he could.

opening his eyes, he reached for his journal, sitting on the passenger seat. He needed to get as many details written down as he could, before they faded. Just as he touched his pen to the first blank page, a thought occurred to him. Dean had told him that he left his journal behind when he left. Didn't really sound like him, but he supposed that it made sense. The journal contained information that the boys would need. Things like past hunts they hadn't been a part of and creatures they'd never gone up against on their own. The boys would need it more than he would.

If he was right, then he couldn't use his journal for this. Sam and Dean had that journal. Sam may swear that he despised everything about the life of a hunter. He may even believe it to be true, but he was wrong. That boy absolutely lived for research. There was nothing he liked more than knowledge and learning. He was born to be one of the Men of Letters, from what John had figured out about the organization. If John wrote anything about this in a journal Sam had access to, it would change things.

For that matter, Dean may not really enjoy research, but he was thorough. If his father just randomly vanished, Dean would tear anything John left behind apart, looking for clues to his "disappearance."

If Sam was a born Man of Letters, Dean was a born Hunter, as much as it pained John to admit it. Once Dean set his mind to something, he wouldn't stop until it was finished.

If Sam would have been a lawyer in this mythical "normal life" John had envisioned for his boys over the years, Dean would have followed in John's footsteps and become a Marine. Maybe his oldest would have made a career out of the corps. Or, maybe, he would've followed in his father's footsteps even closer and come home to become a mechanic. Lord knew that boy was good with his hands. He could take anything apart and put it back together again - usually in better working condition than it started out.

Shaking his head, John tossed his journal back onto the passenger seat and reached to start the car. Any small notebook would work for what he had in mind. He would stop at the nearest store and pick one up. He just had to remember to destry it before he met back up with his sons - or at least before Pastor Jim was killed. That was another painful thought. Jim, Caleb and Bobby were his closest friends. Maybe even his only friends, if he was being honest. The thought that Jim and Caleb would be viciously murdered by demons, and there was nothing he could do to stop it, hurt almost as much as losing Mary. At least Singer would be around to help the boys when John was gone for god. For a few years, anyway. No Hunter expected to live a long life or die quietly in his sleep. Nine times out of ten, you were going down bloody and screaming. You just hoped to take as many of the bastards attacking you with you to Hell as possible. Bobby, at least, seemed to have a quick and sairly painless death.

His own would, apparently, be fairly quick, as well. It couldn't take more than five minutes or so to get a cup of coffee from a hospital vending machine, after all. Painless didn't seem as likely, though. It was a demon deal, which usually meant Hellhounds. Not to mention, Yellow Eyes didn't seem like the "painless" type, even for a demon. He fried Mary alive, pinned to a ceiling. And he would do the same thing to Sam's poor girlfriend. Another senseless death that he was powerless to prevent.

John sighed and shook off his morbid thoughts. It made no sense to dwell on things that he couldn't change. With a bit of effort, he turned his thoughts to the artifact that Dean had used to "call" him. Sam had called it a Wish Pearl. He had never heard of such a thing, but it certainly screamed "cursed object" to him. The potential end result of the wish, especially. Would anyone, other than a Hunter, realize just how much that one wish had changed in their lives? Or, at least, would they register the changes before it was too late to fix them? For that matter, if they had their "heart's desire," would they even want to fix the changes?

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that he needed to find the thing and shove it into a curse box. It was just too dangerous to leave where someone could get their hands on it. Like that damned rabbit's foot. It seemed wonderful until it bit you in the ass - and you realized that it was venomous.

Send it through the right channels. Make sure it got into the right hunter's hands at the right time. Yeah, he could keep others safe from the thing and still make sure Dean had it for that wish.

Maybe he should add an entry on it to his regular journal, just to give the boys an idea that they should grab it... No, he didn't need to. If he made a note of it, they would either refuse to use it or try to find it and use it too soon. Better to make sure that it crossed their path and let it all play out naturally. Or as naturally as anything involving cursed objects and time travel could play out, at least.

Smiling ruefully, he parked at the first store he came to and ran inside to buy a plain notebook. No need for an actual "journal" for this, especially if he was just going to destroy it later.

Back in the Impala, he carefully turned to a page near the middle of the book. The first few pages would contain random maps, just in case Dean found it and got nosey.

**"September, 2005 - Solo 'hunting trip'"**


End file.
